Arnold Zwicky of Language Log has reported on a long-needed investigation into the history of the cliché (or, to a Language Logger, “snowclone”) What is this X of which you speak? I’m astonished to learn it was already being bandied about in Usenet in 1983:

There has been a lot of net discussion about “toilet paper” recently. Just what is this “toilet paper” of which you speak? Where can I find it? (from net.misc, 24 August 1983 (link))

But there doesn’t seem to be an actual, identifiable original from which the parodies were derived: “The origin seems to be in the collective memory of big-screen and small-screen science fiction from the ’50s and ’60s.” There is also discussion of the spurious quotation “Kiss”? What is “kiss”?. Now if only the Loggers would get to work on alternative negations.

Update (August 2015). Commenter charlieO has found a superb antedate from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796): “Father, you amaze me! What is this love of which you speak?” The novel was wildly popular in its day, and it seems reasonable to assume that parodies of Gothic novels (such parodies were also wildly popular) regularly featured this template, which survived to make it into Douglas Adams and a new generation of snarky youth. I note that according to Wikipedia the novel was “written in ten weeks, before [Lewis] turned 20”; he probably would have enjoyed Douglas Adams himself.

Avva posts a question that I have occasionally wondered about: under what conditions are the negations it isn’t and it’s not used? There must have been studies done on this; speakers’ intuition is clearly useless here. The only distinction that occurs to me is that the former is more emphatic, requiring a separation of syllables and at least a minuscule stress on it (we no longer say ’tisn’t as our forefathers did), whereas it’s not can be reduced to a single syllable and muttered if need be (“T’s not fair!”).

Update (March 2010): There’s a paper (pdf) on this topic, “It’s not or isn’t it? Using large corpora to determine the influences on contraction strategies” (Language Variation and Change, 14 (2002), 79–118) by Malcah Yaeger-Dror, Lauren Hall-Lew, and Sharon Deckert. The abstract:

In analyzing not-negation variation in English it becomes clear that specific strategies are used for prosodic emphasis and reduction of not in different social situations, and that contraction strategies vary independently of prosodic reduction. This article focuses on the factors influencing contraction strategies that are clearly dialect related and attempts to tease out those factors that are related to register and speaker stance. First, we review background information critical to an adequate analysis of not-negation and not-contraction. We then describe the corpora chosen for the present study, the research methods employed in the analysis, and the results of the analysis. The variable under analysis is the choice between uncontracted and not-contracted forms and between not-contracted and Aux-contracted forms in well-formed declarative sentences, for verbs which permit both. We end with some suggestions for corpus composition that will enable meaningful comparisons between social situations and between speakers, or characters, within one corpus. As researchers we can assure that future corpora will permit increasingly inclusive and interesting comparative studies; we close with some suggestions for those who wish to carry out studies.

Thanks, Doug!

I’m reading a (surprisingly good) book by Lucy Herndon Crockett called Popcorn on the Ginza (William Sloane Associates, 1949), about the first few years of the Occupation of Japan (she was there with the Red Cross from 1945 to 1947 and has left no biographical trace online that I can find, apart from a stint as a Bread Loaf fellow in 1949); on p. 144 I ran across a word that has stumped me: “The only death to date of an Occupationer at the hands of our former bitter enemy is that of an Air Force lieutenant who, about to return to his fiancée in the States, was poisoned in a geisha house by his corbito, who then took her own life.” (Italics in original.) “Corbito” gets a few hundred Google hits, but they’re all family names as far as I can tell, and the word is not in any of my dictionaries. It occurred to me that it might be an odd anglicization of some Japanese word based on hito ‘person’ (which can become –bito in compounds), but I haven’t found such a word in my Japanese dictionaries. Any ideas?

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As usual, I’ve dilly-dallied on reading the latest New Yorker until it only has a few more days on the newsstands, but for any fellow Adam Gopnik fans, the July 4 issue is indispensable (as usual, they don’t put Gopnik’s piece online—they know how to sell a magazine). “Death of a Fish” (“Through a glass bowl, darkly” [archived]) begins:

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia’s goldfish, Bluie, died, the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or, at least, more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie’s life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

It’s as good as “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” and that’s high praise indeed. A word of warning: those of you who have not seen Vertigo (and I must deplore the New Yorker‘s cockamamie tradition of putting movie titles in quotes) should not read the article until you’ve seen the movie, because there are spoilers aplenty. (Then again, why haven’t you seen Hitchcock’s greatest movie yet?) The rest of you, you know what to do.

Back when I first heard about the new Sappho poem (or, to be more accurate, filled-out version of Lobel-Page’s fragment 58) I said I’d love to see the Greek; now, thanks to serendipity (and I’m very happy to report that Chris is back and blogging up a storm), I can reproduce it here:

῎Υμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων
κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν̣ φιλἀοιδον
λιγύραν χελύνναν·
ἔμοι δ᾽ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ᾽ [ἔ]ο̣ντα
χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ’ ἐγ]ένοντο
τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν·
βάρυς δέ μ’ ὀ [θ]ῦμο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα
δ’ [ο]ὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ’ ἔον ὄρχησθ’ ἴσα
νεβρίοισι.
τὰ <μὲν> στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί
κεν ποείην;
ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ᾽ οὐ δύνατον
γένεσθαι
καὶ γἀρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο
βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
ἔρωι φ̣ . . α̣θ̣ε̣ισαν βάμεν’ εἰς
ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,
ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ’
αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ο̣ν̣ γῆρας, ἔχ[ο]
ν̣τ’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.

Martin West’s translation:

[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts
[be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:
[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;
my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.
This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.
Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,
handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife.

(Via Sauvage Noble.)

I’ve been awash in nostalgia reading Angelo’s reports on the LSA Institute at Sauvage Noble (1.1, 1.2, 1.3); ah for the days of splashing around in long-dead Anatolian languages and Tocharian transliteration! He reflects on “the basic nature of the divide between, e.g. Indo-Europeanists and ‘historical’ O[ptimality]T[heor]ists”:

Traditional historical linguistics is concerned with getting the description down, establishing the data, i.e. answering the question “what were the changes?”, and post-generative historical linguistics is concerned with accounting for “how and why were the changes?”. The former can be impressionistic regarding “how and why”, and the latter can play fast and loose with the “what”… (It’s striking to see how sparse the traditional classes are vs. the post-generative ones, that there’re more of us attending their classes than the other way around, at least based on my schedule and who I recognize.)

As I said in his comments, a thousand times better to have solid facts with insufficient theory than brilliant theory with undependable facts. (And I regret to say I’m not at all surprised at his parenthetical remark.)

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Thanks to a recommendation by Abdul-Walid of Acerbia (soon, alas, to vanish into the dreamtime of the internet, not even archived [July 2 update: poof, it’s gone!]) I have discovered Dave Bonta’s epic poem Cibola, which he has been serializing on his blog Via Negativa since the start of this year; he’s reached the penultimate of the 120 segments into which he’s divided the poem, so you won’t have a long wait for the conclusion. Being partial to a poem containing history, I visited out of curiosity to see what Dave was doing with the long form; I was hooked as soon as I saw the first epigraph, a snippet from the John William Johnson translation of a version of the Malian national epic of Sundiata (or as Johnson eccentrically renders it, “Son-Jara”):

Though a person find no gold,
Though he find no silver,
Should he find his freedom,
Then noble will he be.
A man of power is hard to find.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Malian epic, so this immediately drew me in, and the further epigraphs by William Blackwater and Wendell Berry further ensnared me, so that I was ready for Dave’s own poetry, which begins:

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Another word that’s new to me: pratique is “Clearance granted to a ship to proceed into port after compliance with health regulations or quarantine.” The OED adds: “Especially used in connexion with the South of Europe”; from googling, this no longer seems to be the case. OED citations start with:

1609 W. BIDDULPH in T. Lavender Trav. (1612) 4 Zante. We staied ten daies in the rode of this city, before we could get Pratticke, that is: leaue to come amongst them, or to vse traffique with them.

and end with:

1897 Daily News 14 Jan. 3/5 The P. and O. steamer Nubia arrived in the Thames from Plymouth yesterday afternoon… Dr. Collingridge gave the ship pratique, and the yellow flag was then hauled down amid loud cheers.

As you can see from the first quote, it used to have an anglicized pronunciation (PRATT-ik), and that’s the first one given by the OED, but apparently everyone now says pra-TEEK. What puzzled me was the word itself, but it seems practice (of which this is a variant) used to have a sense ‘Dealings, negotiation, conference, intercourse’ (1584 R. SCOT Discov. Witchcr. V. viii. 85 There was not any conference or practise betwixt them in this case), and this is a specialization of that use.

The Manx Language Samples Page has two samples of spoken Manx recorded over half a century ago; I was thinking of using the longer one (The Pig and the Parson [.wav file]) as a Language Quiz a la Language Log, but I figured the URL would give too much away. (Via Incoming Signals, which got it from my favorite medievalist, Lisa Spangenberg, in a Making Light thread that contains discussion of the revival of Manx along with much else).

As a huge fan of Lorine Niedecker, I’m happy to report that Carlos has posted three of her poems at Halfway down the Danube; here’s one:

Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossomy

Many things are better
flavored with bacon

Sweet Life, My love:
didn’t you ever try
this delicacy—the marrow
in the bone?

And don’t be afraid
to pour wine over cabbage

Of which Carlos says: “It nicely encapsulates the Wisconsin philosophy of life. (Especially the fourth and fifth lines.)”

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